G3 Studios recently announced that its upcoming Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore fantasy will be released in episodes. The decision comes in the wake of an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign to fund the project. G3 is now accepting donations on its website to get the first chapter of the game up and running.

The new plan for the party-based fantasy role playing game will spread the game's content over smaller chapters, giving the team the chance to focus more of its resources on fewer elements at a time. As each episode is released new elements will be integrated into the whole, making the game larger and more detailed with every chapter.

The plan is this: Instead of creating a large-scale game all at once, we decided to take an episodic approach to the game. As opposed to forcing ourselves to a development schedule that spans a year or more, and which needs to be funded up front entirely, we have decided to develop the game in installments, each an individual chapter in the story—as you would have in a book—which, when taken together make up the entire story of the original game.

However, instead of having individual smaller games, each new chapter will be entirely integrated in the whole, giving you ONE GAME that will get ever bigger!

There are a number of great examples out there, for games that have done very well using an episodic approach. Especially “The Walking Dead” by Telltale Games jumps to mind instantly as an example of episodic-delivery-done-right.

Each of “Deathfire’s” six chapters we will build, will expand the game as a whole when they are released, not only continuing the story, but also introducing new features as they enter the picture. The advantage of this approach is, I think, self-evident.

Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore is a party-based computer role-playing game with turn-based combat that hearkens back to the Golden Era of fantasy cRPGs. Built upon the power of the Unity 3D engine, “Deathfire” utilizes a first person view that gives the player the feeling of being there. A solid role-playing engine that utilizes over forty visible character attributes, along with countless invisible ones to track behavior, makes the heartbeat of the game, and it allows us to analyze and adjust gameplay on the fly, and react to the player’s actions, shaping the story around these actions and decisions.

Developed by fully independent developer and publisher G3 Studios in Southern California, and spearheaded by veteran game designer/producer Guido Henkel (Planescape: Torment, Realms of Arkania Trilogy, Fallout II, etc.), the game is currently in its early stages of development and is scheduled for release in late 2014.